Liberal Democrat IT Online Policy Consultation

Welcome to our open policy consultation on Information Technology and Intellectual Property

We are doing this as a pilot to learn how we can use the power of the internet to consult with the public and relevant experts in all our future policy development. The power of the net means that we can get input from experts from around the UK and the world – and also build a community to engage in discussion of our policy ideas.

This is consultation not official Liberal Democrat policy (yet)

This consultation paper is presented as the first stage in the development of Party policy on Information and Communication Technology. It does not represent agreed Party policy. It is designed to stimulate debate and discussion within the Party and outside.

Based on the responses generated, on the party’s fundamental values and on the deliberations of the working group, a full Information and Communication Technology policy paper will be drawn up and presented to the party’s Conference for debate.

We want to know what you think

The Liberal Democrats believe strongly in consulting and listening with the communities that we campaign in. In this particular case we are interested in hearing from the internet community with policy ideas and reaction to the ideas put forward in our policy green paper. There are currently two opportunities for feedback:

The Federal Policy Committee is setting up a Policy Working Group on these issues, to be chaired by Dr Julian Huppert MP.

The working group will review all aspects of policy on IT and the internet. It will be necessary to give significant attention to intellectual property issues, with particular attention to their application to the digital economy.

There’s been quite a lot of activity in the Lib Dem blogosphere over the last couple of days about the decision by the Lib Dem Lords to propose an amendment to the Digital Economy Bill allowing injunctions requiring ISPs to block to particular websites.

After quite a few years, a group has set itself up on ACT to discuss Lib Dem IT policy.

The group describes itself as:

Lib Dems for some decent IT Policy – open standards, decent project management, re-skilling local and national government in technology – less throwing cash at EDS et al, fair and good value tendering.

an attempt to map the Isle of Wight’s roads in one weekend for OpenStreetMap.org, a website that helps create maps free for anyone to use for any purpose. If Ordnance Survey and other national agencies will not make their data freely available, then OpenStreetMap, developed over the past two years, will re-collect it from scratch.

It links to the Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign for free public access to data about the UK and its citizens.

So far, this isn’t an area where the Liberal Democrats have policy one way or the other – although given our historical distrust of monopolies, whether state or private, I suspect it’s something we would support. The current situation also puts up a financial barrier to all kinds of party activity which could be helpful to fellow citizens: looking up local councillors and campaigners, creating tools to make it easier for people to report casework etc. etc.

Richard and I were shooting the breeze and we realised that our former version of this site replicated many of the techniques used by WordPress – although mostly via manual means. So as an experiment, and to provide a model for other party groups wishing to consult on policy, we’ve converted the site to WordPress and created a template that replicated our old site.

The one thing that this will let us easily do is post updates on IT related issues (such as ID cards) and easily allow comments on the site without all the hassle this caused on the old site!